A week ago, President Obama publicly threw his support to Bill de Blasio (shown in suit), the Democratic Party candidate for New York City mayor, joining Hollywood activists Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte — along with Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and a host of veteran “Progressives” who are endorsing the former NYC councilman and public advocate.

On the same day that President Obama announced his endorsement (September 23), the New York Times published an extensive investigation of de Blasio’s radical Marxist background, focusing particularly on his devotion to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. De Blasio also has been a big supporter of Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe’s murderous kleptocrat Robert Mugabe. He also expressed his support for “democratic socialism.”

Nevertheless, in his endorsement of de Blasio, President Obama declared: “Progressive change is the centerpiece of Bill de Blasio’s vision for New York City, and it’s why he will be a great mayor of America’s largest city.” He further averred that “Bill’s agenda for New York is marked by bold, courageous ideas that address the great challenges of our time.”

The New York Times should, perhaps, be congratulated for “discovering” de Blasio’s radical past and making it more widely known, but it would be interesting to read transcript’s of the Times’ editorial discussions and e-mails explaining why they did not publish this damaging material until after de Blasio had won the Democratic primary and, essentially, sewn up the mayoral race. The Times itself, of course, was on the same page with de Blasio and most other communists, Marxists, and leftists of varying stripes in supporting the Sandinistas against Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, America’s most important ally in Central America, in 1979, in much the same way that the Times also supported the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini the same year, and Castro’s overthrow of Batista two decades earlier.

The New York Post has been on a tear over the past week, pounding de Blasio not only for his Sandanista support but for honeymooning in Fidel’s paradise with his wife, lesbian activist Chirlane McCray. (Some of the Post’s blasts at de Blasio can be seen here, here and here).

De Blasio and McCray were so enamored of Fidel’s island gulag that, like thousands of other hardcore activists, they snuck in illegally, evading the U.S. embargo by first going to Canada and then flying from there to Havana.

De Blasio’s ultra-left record has been well summarized by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton of NoisyRoom.Net here, by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media (AIM) here, and Ronald Radosh at PJMedia here.

Radosh, a former communist “red diaper baby” who broke with the comrades de Blasio still finds inspiring, writes:

De Blasio’s path to power reveals a local version of the path trod by Barack Obama — that of a “Long March through the Existing Institutions,” which is what the German New Left revolutionary leaders in the 1960s called the road to power. For the advanced capitalist countries, Mao’s Long March was not the way; rather, the path was political power by working through the existing political structure and moving to take over one of the mainstream dominant political parties.

In New York City, with his ally in the radical Working Families Party — affiliated with the former ACORN — de Blasio has shunned the real goal of socialism. Calling himself progressive, he has worked to create a majority to run New York that is anti-business and supports greater and greater entitlements. As Jonathan Tobin writes in Commentary, de Blasio’s “left-wing populism and hostility to both the business community and the police tactics that have helped fuel New York’s revival bode ill for the city’s future.”

De Blasio’s radical record notwithstanding, it could be argued that other Democratic candidates came down even further to the left of him. Lesbian activist and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and disgraced former sex-tweeting Congressman Anthony Weiner provided some of his competition in the primary. The prize for ultra-ultra-Left, though, probably goes to New York City Comptroller John Liu. As our articles listed below indicate, Liu has a long history of slavish support for Beijing’s Communist Party-ruled regime, as well as direct ties to the NYC-based Communist Workers Party, a militant Maoist sect and one of the most violent revolutionary groups in the country. Fortunately, he received only 6.8 percent of the vote, putting him in fourth place behind de Blasio, Bill Thopson, and Quinn — but ahead of Weiner. It does indeed bode ill for the city’s future when sane New York dwellers can heave a sigh of relief that voters only elected a pro-Castro, pro-Sandinista lefty, rather than a full-fledged Maoist.

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